the ultimate content strategist playbook no. 3: staffing and

ULTIMATE CONTENT STRATEGIST PLAYBOOK

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The Ultimate Content Strategist Playbook No. 3:

Staffing and Launching Your Content Marketing Program

Copyright © 2015 Contently. All rights reserved. contently.com By Joe Lazauskas


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I. Introduction 3

II. Crafting a Brand Voice & Mission Statement 8

III. Identifying Story Types & Topics 15

IV. Building an Editorial Calendar 20

V. Staffing Your Content Team 24

VI. Creating an Approval Workflow 30

VII. Conclusion 35

Table of Contents


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On the evening of March 2, our content/marketing team

found itself celebrating at a Soho dive bar called Mila-

no’s for a few reasons: three birthdays; two new

additions to the team; and, most importantly, a suc-

cessful month of February in which we saw over

200,000 readers. We toasted, but in truth, a lot of that

success was attributed to work we did months ago.

Though it felt like new pieces were attracting all our

readers, only 40 percent of our readers and 48 percent

of our total attention time for the month came from

posts published in February.

What had the biggest impact was that we spent the

previous 18 months publishing three or four stories per

day. In February, stories published last year like “The

Pros, Cons, and Costs of the Top 10 Content Distribution

Platforms,” “7 Keys to SEO for Content Marketers,” and

“What’s the Difference Between B2B and B2C Market-

ing?” all generated over 1,000 readers and 3,000 atten-

tion minutes, just like they do every month.

In December 2013, Jay Acunzo, then senior content

manager at HubSpot, had a similar revelation. That

month, he crunched the numbers and found that 70

percent of the roughly 2 million hits on HubSpot’s

blog came from posts that were more than a month

old. “That entire team could stop blogging for a whole

month and still see 70% of the expected results—zero

work needed,” he wrote in a blog post. “Now that’s ROI!

Show me a PPC campaign capable of doing that.”

TOTAL TRAFFICIN FEB.

TOTAL ATTENTION TIMEIN FEB.

FEBRUARY POSTS PREV. POSTS

40%60%

48%52%

http://nextviewventures.com/blog/should-startups-blog/


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Jay was shocked. So was I. And that’s natural—when

you do content marketing well, it can feel like highway

robbery. As venture capitalist and content market-

ing expert Tomasz Tunguz recently wrote on his blog,

“Content is one of the few forms of marketing that has

a compounding return.”

The idea of compounding returns in content marketing

may sound complex, but it’s actually quite simple. Most

brand publishers aren’t in the business of publishing

timely news; rather, they focus on telling stories that

entertain, solve a problem, or provide important advice

and information. These evergreen stories remain

relevant for a long period of time and continue to bring

in new readers via search and social. Tunguz, for

instance, found that the average post on his blog

generates about 150 views on the first day, and about

20 for each subsequent day. After one year, the average

post still generates about 18 views per day.

That may not sound like a lot of pageviews, but when

you’re publishing new stories every day, there’s a

compounding effect. Each day, there are more total

stories generating traffic, which results in compounding

growth. In a hypothetical model, those compounding

returns would result in readership growth that looks

something like this:


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“Like a bank account that starts out small and earns

incremental gains, but over time becomes quite large,”

Tunguz writes, “content marketing efforts require

consistent investment but ultimately can yield enor-

mous results.”

Of course, this is an ideal model, and simply publishing

every day does not guarantee success. As we covered in

Playbook No. 2, you need to have a content roadmap—

a clearly defined audience and a sense of all the gaps

in the content market so you can capitalize on every

opportunity to capture your audience’s attention. You

also need to produce stories that are good enough to

be shared. Otherwise, there won’t be a compounding

return on social. The same goes for search.

“There’s not a whole lot of value in writing a decent

blog post anymore,” explained Moz founder and SEO

luminary Rand Fishkin. “[There’s not a lot of value]

unless you can be pretty extraordinary.”

While the potential compounding returns of content

marketing are enough to make any brand marketer’s

mouth water, the challenge of doing it successfully is

still a massive undertaking. You need to create a steady

cadence of content so your returns grow quickly, but

that content also has to be so good that it will stand

out in the sea of crappy posts that pollute the web. And

since the competition is getting fiercer every day, you

need to continuously improve and evolve if you want to

stand out.

We’ve reached a crucial stage in our Ultimate Content

Playbook series—the point where the difficult work

begins and brands start to fail. Over the past few years,

many brands have successfully evangelized a content

program and drawn up a strong strategy; few, however,

have successfully executed and seized that opportunity.


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But if you take the appropriate steps, the likelihood of

success increases—and the potential rewards are well

worth the investment of time and money.

For the rest of our third content marketing playbook,

we’ll take you through the five necessary steps required

to execute a content marketing program, developed

from the best practices we learned from our own

experiences as publishers and the work we’ve done

launching the content marketing efforts of hundreds of

companies around the globe:

1. Crafting a brand voice and content marketing mission

statement to guide your efforts.

2. Identifying your story types and requirements so you

know what to create.

3. Building an editorial calendar to hold yourself ac-

countable to a consistent publishing schedule.

4. Staffing your content team so you can begin creating

content.

5. Creating an approval workflow so you can operate

like a real newsroom.


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2. Crafting a Brand Voice & Mission Statement

Creating a mission statement is one of the most difficult

yet enjoyable stages of the content marketing journey.

A great mission statement speaks not only to your con-

tent plan and goals, but also captures who you are as a

brand and as a publisher. It’s the rallying cry that makes

you excited to come to work every day, pushing you to

do more—and do better—than your competitors.


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Like the word “irony,” brand voice is something people love to talk about

but don’t really understand. It’s far more than a set of adjectives (clev-

er, smart, millennial) and can’t be captured in a mock tweet. It goes far

deeper than that, which makes sense: Your brand voice is at the heart of

every piece of content you create.

To craft a brand voice, I’m a big fan of an exercise that content strategist

Melissa Lafsky Wall recently advocated in a piece on The Content Strate-

gist. Her advice is so brilliant that instead of summarizing her ideas and

butchering it in the process, I’ll just share her recommendation in full:


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Say you’re going to a dinner party full of people you

don’t know. Whether you admit it or not, you’ll want

each of the other people at the party to leave with a

certain viewpoint or opinion about you at the end of the

night. So you act a certain way, choose certain words

and conversation topics over others, make certain jokes,

and generally work to be the most charming, or funny,

or book-smart, or emotionally sensitive, etc. version of

yourself, depending on which of these traits are the most

important for you to convey.

With brands, it’s really not all that different. The funda-

mentals of voice comes down to a personality—priori-

tizing a set of traits that comprise an identity, and then

communicating in a way that expresses and prioritizes

those traits. Which means that, in order to create a suc-

cessful voice, a brand is required to take on some of the

personality of, well, an actual person (the Supreme Court

would be so pleased).

The logical question now is, “So what personality traits

does my brand embody?” The answer can only come from

one source: your brand itself. No one else can identify

your brand’s values and point of view other than the

individuals who comprise it. The most successful brands

stand for an idea (Apple, GE, IBM), and that idea is a

good place to start when it comes to distilling your brand

values into a key concept or identity.

You may be thinking that what I’m describing resembles

a common branding exercise, in which teams boil their

brand down to four or five words or colors or images, etc.

But identifying the voice involves a bit more anthropo-

morphization than that (and yes, that’s a word—I looked

it up).


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Another way to think of it is this: If your brand was the person at the dinner

party, who would it be? The gadget freak who snagged an iPhone 6 a week

before they went on sale? The honest and kind friend you’d consult while

getting dressed for a date? The mad scientist determined to find a way to

make fuel out of pencil shavings?

These examples may sound hyperbolic, but they get at values that lead

people to prioritize certain skills and behaviors over others. Brands are no

different.


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A clear sense of identity is what categorizes the best

brand publishers. GE is the smart, inquisitive, clev-

er science nerd who blows your mind. Red Bull is the

death-defying rock star you want to hang out with.

HubSpot is the inbound marketing genius who wants

to help you get that promotion. Moz is the wizard of

SEO with secrets that will fundamentally change your

business. In different ways, they’re all a kind of person

who will accumulate a posse of interested admirers at

that dinner party.

Of course, this exercise of anthropomorphization is just

that—an exercise. Brands can’t have a voice or a mis-

sion; the people who communicate on their behalf do.

When I spoke with the men behind the content power-

houses at HubSpot, Moz, and GE, that much was clear.

You can hear the mission in the brand voice.

TOMAS KELLNER, MANAGING EDITOR, GE REPORTS:

“Here we are. We’re 130 years old. We were founded by

Thomas Edison, and guess what? We are still working

on really hard problems that the entire planet has to

be dealing with, whether it’s the future of energy or

whether it’s the future of electricity or whether it’s new

propulsion for planes that will get you from New York

to Tokyo in four hours.”

JOE CHERNOV, VP OF MARKETING, HUBSPOT:

“HubSpot is not only a company, but it’s also the cata-

lyst of a movement. And as a community has coalesced

around that movement, it’s our job to nurture and

foster it.”

RAND FISHKIN, FOUNDER, MOZ:

“[Content is] part of our DNA. We believe in sharing and

being transparent in putting out there the things that

we’ve learned. ... We want to try and help marketers

first. That’s our underlying goal. We really don’t think

about content marketing as being part of our funnel. It’s

part of our mission.”


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While the business goals of your content marketing efforts are import-

ant—be it generating leads, sales, brand awareness, industry education,

or, more likely, some combination of initiatives—we find it extremely

helpful to keep your goals focused on the audience you want to serve.

For example, this is our mission statement for The

Content Strategist:


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If the marketing blogosphere were a college, there would

currently be about 10,000 professors angling for ten-

ure—and all of them would be teaching some version of

inbound 101 or remedial content. Picture a dusty hall full

of creaky desks, a syllabus full of old listicles and ques-

tionable stats, and the teacher droning on and on while

the students pass notes in the form of Pitbull GIFs.

Then picture the Kool-Aid man bursting through the wall

screaming, “OHHH YEAHHHHHHHHH!”

That’s us. We’re the Kool-Aid man of marketing pubs.

What’s that mean? Well, first and foremost we want to

give you information you can’t find anywhere else on the

Internet, and we want to do it every single day. Forget

telling you that certain things work—we want to tell you

why they work, how they work, and what’s going to work

next. We’re going to continuously talk to the smartest

people in our industry, and we’re going to tell you what

we find out. Media is changing marketing (and vice

versa), and understanding what it all means and how to

take advantage means thinking beyond the tropes of the

past.

We also aim to have fun because this is fun! The late,

great David Carr put it best when he said, “Creating

media content is a diverting activity that rarely resembles

actual work.” And if you’re reading The Content Strategist,

it likely means your job involves telling stories in some

way or another.

There’s no reason that marketing content has to be dry or

boring—after all, a good story is a good story, no matter

what it’s about. Just because we’re writing about content

marketing doesn’t mean we can’t use NBA metaphors

or make fun of our own buzzwords. There’s no reason a

story about ROI or legal approvals can’t have a few jokes

in it. Marketers are humans too.

http://mtv.mtvnimages.com/uri/mgid:file:http:shared:mtv.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/tumblr_mcmcbaIReE1qa9pg6o1_500-1421345667.gif

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar6xC8KM-jk


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At Contently, we talk a lot about “building a better media world,” which

sounds like something out of Silicon Valley, but it’s true. We believe in

helping people tell amazing stories instead of polluting the web with me-

diocrity, and in the power of ditching intrusive advertising in favor of great

media experiences. The Internet is what we make it, and we want to make

it awesome.


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Notice how focused we are on our readers; that’s not a

front. We do have clear business goals for The Content

Strategist—building brand awareness, fortifying our

reputation as a content marketing thought leader, ed-

ucating clients and potential clients, and driving email

subscribers, leads, sales and opportunities—but our pri-

mary focus and editorial mission remains helping our

readers become better, smarter content marketers. And

we’ve found putting our readers first is the best way to

drive all of those results.

Our mission statement reflects our commitment to

editorial purity, and if you talk to successful brand

publishers, they’ll tell you that commitment is key. In

the words of Joe Chernov: “[O]wning your audience

comes with huge responsibilities—namely the need

to ‘protect’ that audience from marketing’s shadow. ...

If we fell victim to the temptation to strip-mine that

audience with overt promotions, we’d destroy the asset

many people have worked so hard to build.”

As you identify your brand voice and craft your mis-

sion statement, keep all of that in mind. You have to

put your readers first and give them what they’re not

getting elsewhere. Your mission statement will be your

guiding light, the document that keeps you in check,

inspires you, and protects your content from market-

ing’s shadow. It’s crucial. I don’t know where we’d be

without it.


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3. Identifying Story Types & Topics

Once you have a mission statement that makes you

beam with pride, it’s time to figure out what types of con-

tent you should create—blog posts, reported features,

photography, illustrations, infographics, comics, videos,

white papers and e-books, etc. This is a critical step. You

can’t start to map out your editorial calendar, staff your

content team, or design your approval workflow until you

know what kind of content you’re going to make.


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This is another step that should be informed by the

content strategy analysis you already conducted (as

outlined in our last playbook). If your particular niche

is saturated with basic blog posts but lacking longform

features and videos, you may want to invest in the lat-

ter. If no one’s poking fun at your industry with com-

ics, that could represent a great opportunity for you to

stand out. But keep a few rules of thumb in mind:

1. Try a little bit of everything out. Content marketing

involves a cycle of constant learning and optimiza-

tion. At Contently, we boil this process down to the

executive-friendly abbreviation of CEO—create, en-

gage, optimize—and visualize it with the flywheel be-

low. Your initial content strategy should be a refined

educated guess about what will work, but you need

to be constantly testing new things and optimizing

based off the results.

2. Prioritize quality over quantity. It’s hard to stand out,

so you shouldn’t think of your infographics as some-

thing you can get done cheaply on Fiverr, or your

original photography as something Steve the Lead

Gen Guy can take care of with his Samsung Galaxy.

Keep that in mind when evaluating different formats.

3. Describe your story types for content novices. If

you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re more

sophisticated than your colleagues when it comes

to content. Over-explain what each content format

entails.

CREATE

ENG

AG

E

OP

TIM

I Z E


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QUICK HITTER

250–500 words to introduce breaking news, research, or

a cool visual component like an infographic or video.

WEB-SOURCED IN-DEPTH

500–1,200 words based on web sources; includes a

complex level of analysis.

BASIC REPORTED STORY

400–800 words with between one and three sources.

LONGFORM FEATURE STORY

1,000+ words with a compelling narrative focus and

multiple primary sources.

INFOGRAPHIC

Graphic visual representation of information, data, or

knowledge that communicates key industry topics.

VIDEO

A story up to five minutes long about storytelling,

including interviews with thought leaders and/or brief

news updates.

COMIC

Single or multiple panel illustrations lampooning the

content marketing industry.

E-BOOK

3,000–10,000-word guides and industry reports, usually

downloadable in exchange for an email address.

To see what this looks like, here are our different story types:


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BRANDS

News, trends, and analysis of the branded content

movement.

MEDIA

Journalism, native advertising, and the future of the

media business.

ROI

Best practices for tying content to business results.

SOCIAL

Strategies, tools, and tips for spreading content through

the social web.

VOICES

Thought leadership, opinions, and perspectives on the

future of content.

Next, it’s important to detail the different topics you’d like to cover. Our topics align with the five main

sections of The Content Strategist: Brands, Media, Social, ROI, and Voices.

Once you have these tables compiled, keep referring back to them as you create your editorial calendar

to make sure you’re trying out each topic with all possible story types.


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4. Building an Editorial Calendar

Now it’s time for the fun part—building your editorial cal-

endar. Since you still have a lot to figure out before you

can get up and running, you’ll likely want to give yourself

a cushion of six to eight weeks before you start publish-

ing. Building an editorial calendar will give you a clear

picture of what types of stories you’ll publish on a daily

basis and who you need to hire to get up and running.


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While the ultimate goal is to become a daily publisher,

you don’t want to overwhelm yourself when you’re just

starting out. Don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. Gener-

ally, we recommend starting out with two stories per

week and increasing from there—though you might be

able to handle less or more depending on your inter-

nal capabilities. It’s important to be ambitious, but not

unrealistic.

To be honest, we’re spoiled when it comes to editorial

calendars. The Contently platform has a gorgeous drag-

and-drop calendar with easy filters, a text editor, and

built-in approval workflows. However, not everyone

can afford this type of software.

If you have absolutely no budget for a calendar but

are running your site on WordPress, your best bet is to

use the WordPress calendar. It’s basic but gets the job

done. If you don’t have WordPress, see if your content

management system (CMS) offers something similar. If

not, HubSpot’s editorial calendar template is a decent

stopgap measure you can edit easily to fit your needs.

DivvyHQ can also get the job done if you have a small

budget and team since its editorial calendar software is

priced on a per-seat basis.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/editorial-calendar/

http://offers.hubspot.com/blog-editorial-calendar

https://app.divvyhq.com/marketingsite/pricing/?_ga=1.203862034.36584171.1425843988


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AUTHOR:

The storyteller or storytellers responsible for producing

the story (the writer, designer, illustrator, videographer,

etc.).

DUE DATE:

When the story or story assets are due from the author.

PUBLISH DATE:

The date you intend to publish the piece. Be sure to

schedule extra time for revisions, adding in more time

(at least four days) for more complex topics or less time

(one or two days) for simpler posts.

INTENDED AUDIENCE:

The primary or secondary audience the story is intend-

ed to reach, as we outlined in our last playbook.

FORMAT / TYPE:

As outlined above.

TOPIC:

As outlined above.

URL:

The URL of the story once it is published.

TARGET KEYWORDS (OPTIONAL):

It can also be useful to include target keywords for the

writer to keep in mind—although you never want to

encourage keyword stuffing, which will damage the

quality of your story. It’s a fine line, so make sure you

walk it.

But whatever system you use, you want to be sure you can track and filter a few important details:


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As you start to fill out your calendar, establish a steady publishing

cadence. Posting at a regular pace will make it much easier to get into

a rhythm when it comes time to engage your audience, measure your

success, and optimize for the next round of publishing.

For example, here’s a current snapshot of our calendar for The Content

Strategist. Notice how there’s a steady flow of two to four posts each

weekday. This ensures that we deliver consistent value to our readers

on each of our primary distribution channels (email, Facebook, Twitter,

LinkedIn, and Google+).

Now that you can see what type of content you need to create, it's time

to staff up.


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5. Staffing Your Content Team

The idea of staffing a content team and building a

“brand newsroom” is enough to give some marketers a

panic attack. But it’s less complex than you think.


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First, evaluate what internal resources you already have.

That’s going to be the biggest factor that determines the

mix of in-house people and freelancers you need to

deliver based on the strategy you’ve outlined.

Most successful brand publishers take a hybrid ap-

proach to their newsroom. A core in-house team serves

as the protector of the brand voice, distributes and

measures content, and optimizes editorial strategy;

freelancers add subject matter expertise and storytelling

firepower to the mix.

“I think that brands are using freelancers a lot more

simply because it’s a lot easier for them to scale based

on what their content needs and requirements are,”

Michele Linn, the Content Marketing Institute’s director

of content, recently told The Content Strategist.

Coca-Cola, for instance, has a small core team of edi-

tors and designers, complementing that with a staff of

freelance storytellers through Contently to scale their

content operation. They now publish 12–15 pieces per

week on Coca-Cola Journey. “We’ve really tried to carve

out a beat system with our Contently writers,” said Jay

Moye, Coca-Cola Journey’s managing editor. “It’s nice to

know who we can go to for certain stories.”

Those writers can also supply fresh story ideas, voices,

and perspectives that spice up your storytelling. One of

Coca-Cola Journey’s most popular posts, for example,

was a story about Coke-themed weddings—a phenom-

enon unearthed by a freelancer named Laura Randall.

The feature story told the tale of a few happy couples

and their Coke-red nuptials.

http://contently.com/strategist/2015/01/21/build-vs-buy-why-top-brands-are-leaning-on-freelancers-to-build-hybrid-newsrooms/


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“That was not an idea that we can take credit for. That

was Laura’s idea,” Moye said. “And there are many more

where that came from.”

But while freelance resources can be a great help, it’s

important to have at least one in-house employee

devoted to guiding your content marketing operation—

ideally someone with a wealth of editorial experience.

At GE Reports, that person is Tomas Kellner, a veteran

reporter from Forbes who writes most of the magazine’s

feature stories, directs editorial strategy, and teaches

storytelling workshops to GE employees around the

world. Kellner also relies on a small squad of internal

writers and freelancers from content marketing agency

Group SJR.

To visualize this hybrid model, let’s look at how we

structured our own editorial team at Contently—and

how it’s evolved as we’ve proven the business value of

our content efforts and grown our team.


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VP OF CONTENT

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

EDITORIAL INTERN

DESIGNER

Here’s what our editorial org chart looked like in December 2013, when we hired our first full-time edi-

tor (me!) and started investing serious resources in our own content marketing:

POOL OF FREELANCERS

(journalists, designers,

illustrators, videographers)


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VP OF CONTENT

sam slaughter

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF DESIGN TEAM

And here’s how we structure things today:

SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

PHOTO EDITOR

part time

AST. EDITOR

part time

POOL OF FREELANCERS

(journalists, designers,

illustrators, videographers)


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As our content efforts have grown more ambitious (telling better stories,

launching a second magazine, etc.) our team has gotten bigger. Simul-

taneously, the pool of freelancers we use through our own network has

allowed us to easily scale our efforts.

Ultimately, growing your team gradually is the safest and smartest way

to go. As much as I would have loved to have today’s team 15 months

ago, we had to figure out what worked with a small operation before

taking that leap.

Another note: If you don’t have the power to hire people to full-time

editorial positions, you can still build a core staff with freelancers. When

you’re starting small, hiring a freelance managing editor for 10 hours a

week, a photo editor/designer for another five, and a half-dozen free-

lance writers can be sufficient to get the job done—as long as every-

one is good enough. At Contently, we supply our clients with freelance

managing editors, and it’s proven to be a highly successful model. All

those editors are rigorously vetted and usually have at least 10 years of

experience.


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6. Creating an Approval Workflow

In sports, there’s a common cliché about everyone know-

ing their role and sticking to it. The same can be said for

publishing.


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Whose job is it to generate story ideas? Who turns those story ideas into

assignments so you don’t blow your entire budget on 50 cat listicles?

Who edits those stories? Who presses Publish?

Below is the approval workflow or editorial team uses at Contently for

The Content Strategist for a day-to-day text article. As you’ll see, anyone

can come up with a story idea, but as the captain of our content strat-

egy, I’m the one who assigns every story on the calendar. And though

members of our team are responsible for edits, photo treatments, and

copy edits, each story comes back to me for approval before it goes live.

That way, if there are any mistakes—or anything that doesn’t fit our style

or standard of quality—I catch it before it goes live (or, if not, I take the

blame).


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CONTENT IDEATION / PITCHES

writers / contently staff

EDIT 1

associate editor

EDIT 2

editor-in-chief

COPY EDIT

copy editor

PUBLISH

editor-in-chief

PHOTO TREATMENT

photo editor

LEGAL QUESTIONS?

CREATE ASSIGNMENT

editor-in-chief

FIRST DRAFT

writer


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This process changes slightly for multimedia posts, or if

I’m the author of the article, but the system works the

same: I assign, approve, and deal with the consequenc-

es, both good and bad.

Our system happens to be relatively simple because we

work at a small company without a lot of bureaucracy

and don’t cover a highly regulated industry like finance

or pharmaceuticals. And if you do work at a fairly large

company or in one of those industries, you might be

shaking your head because you know there’s one big

challenge you’ll have to overcome: brand and legal ap-

provals. You’ve heard the horror stories about organiza-

tions that take months to approve simple social media

updates. It’s something that can completely derail a

content operation and needs to be avoided at all costs.

The key—as Contently Studios Director John Hazard

wrote last fall in an excellent guide to content approv-

als—is to get lawyers and superfluous brand managers

out of the approval process as much as possible by

setting and documenting clear guidelines that ensure

your content is compliant with legal and brand style

standards. To streamline your publishing infrastructure,

you need to make sure everyone is aware of those stan-

dards. How do you do that? Conveniently enough, it’s

the same way you ensure editorial quality—by placing

one key stakeholder in charge of final decisions.

GE Reports publishes at a quick, steady cadence, even

though a lot of their stories report on the company’s

emerging technologies in highly regulated areas like

healthcare, where non-compliant content can have se-

rious legal consequences. But because of the standards

the company has in place, the editorial team has the

power and flexibility to publish at the speed of news

without fear of penalty.


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Managing Editor Tomas Kellner ensures that every story

is fact-checked with internal sources, a practice he per-

fected during his journalism career. And when a story

actually does need to go through legal approval, he

knows when to send it up the chain of command based

on his editorial instincts. “With health care, for exam-

ple, you could not publish a story without legal approv-

al,” he said. “Often, when you talk about a device, it

actually has to go through two sets of lawyers. It has to

go through the regular legal department, but then it also

has to go through the regulatory lawyers that make sure

that what you’re saying actually describes fairly what

the machine is doing.”

However, the process doesn’t bog down GE Reports’

publishing schedule because of the clear understanding

and close relationship that Kellner has built with his

legal department over time. “In the beginning, it was a

difficult practice for me to learn,” he explained. “I didn’t

know who these people were and how to get the copy

through efficiently. It often got stuck. It’s like build-

ing a house. You have to put in the plumbing. Once

you know who these people are, you don’t have to go

through the various gatekeepers—you can go directly to

them and check on your story and see how it’s mov-

ing.”

And since Kellner serves as the keeper of GE Reports’

editorial voice and content standards, the company has

a system of checks and balances that allows it to stand

out as a stellar publisher without getting sued.

“When it comes to a company publication and your

stories get noticed by the top-level publications, you are

under a special degree of scrutiny,” Kellner said.

If a 130-year-old behemoth like GE can get its content

approvals in order, so can you.


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Nearly every week, I interview successful brand pub-

lishers, and one of the first questions is almost always

about how they structure their “newsrooms.” Who’s on

your team, I ask. How does the sausage get made?

Universally, there’s an upswing in their voice; pride

shines through. And that’s because they know a univer-

sal thing; staffing, launching, and coordinating a con-

tent marketing machine is hard work, and it’s a process

that takes time to perfect. But once your team is in a

groove, it’s a beautiful thing to behold; you make each

other better, and it’s a foregone conclusion that your

success will keep building over time.

Conclusion

This isn’t a unique sentiment; it’s something you’ll hear

from coaches, entrepreneurs, sales heads, or, heck, even

the manager at your favorite dive bar. For tens of thou-

sands of years, people have been coming together to

make something great—it’s just that only recently has

that thing been great branded content.

Now, you have the tools to staff and launch the content

marketing machine of your dreams and start consis-

tently creating high-quality content that you’re proud

of. In our next (and fourth) content marketing playbook,

we’ll talk about how to distribute that content and build

a loyal audience. Stay tuned.


CONTENTLY36

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the ultimate content strategist playbook no. 3: staffing and

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